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Non-Profit

How to incorporate workforce management into budget planning

Questica

May 16, 2017

Budget planning and forecasting is an essential and unavoidable process for any organization. Too often, workers view it with disdain. They see it as cumbersome and inefficient. If you’ve read any of our blogs before, you know that Questica doesn’t believe budget planning is something to be dreaded. There are ways to make it a faster, streamlined process that allows your organization more opportunities for action. One of those ways is incorporating techniques from workforce management. Interested?

If you’re looking for a thorough explanation of what Workforce Management is and how it works, there are some helpful instructional videos which are a great place to start. To summarize, Workforce Managementis a set of processes that an institution uses to optimize its productivity. It is used by companies to improve the productivity of individual employees, departments, and sometimes even the entire organization itself. Its strengths lie in the ability to quantify the amount and types of labor needed to accomplish particular jobs on a daily basis. This can include budget planning itself!

Why is workforce management an important process?

Workforce Management is important because too often, regular processes like budget planning are handled inefficiently. Inefficiency wastes too much time, and wasted time means wasted resources and extraneous expenses. Many non-profit organizations simply can’t afford frivolity. Additionally, many organizations should consider the retiring age of its employees. Statistics are showing that more Americans are leaving the workforce, including the retiring baby boomer generation. New hires brought in to replace them require basic training. Their inexperience runs the greater risk of, once again, wasting your invaluable time and resources. Workforce Management is a way to lower that risk and tighten the overall productivity of your workforce into a smoothly operating machine of efficiency.

How is workforce management different from time management?

If you’re new to Workforce Management, it might be easy to look at it as the same thing as time management. After all, both involve getting workers on the schedule, right? Not exactly. Workforce Management is about assigning the right staff to the right job at the right time. It’s about optimization. You need to ensure that all tasks are handled by the most qualified workers. Anyone who works in management can tell you that this is not as easy as it might sound. There are numerous complex factors that affect the managerial decisions — many of them last minute. For example, an employee might have unpredictable personal concerns which prevent them from working at a certain time. How will you accommodate their needs while balancing the needs of your organization?

How workforce management can apply to budget planning

The most important thing is to look at the gap between what you hope to accomplish and what actually occurs. Is the budget forecast frequently over or underestimated by a significant factor? Is it taking too much time to make a forecast every year, causing your organization to miss significant financial opportunities? Once you identify the areas which need improvement, find the people who provide the right skills to narrow that gap. Then, move them to where they need to be. For budget planning, you want to make sure you have the right team of planners and forecasters. The right team will make accurate predictions and ensure that your organization knows where it is headed.

One way to make budget planning easier and more efficient for your team is to have the right kind of software. Questica offers functionality and cost-effective solutions to help you and your team with budgeting and forecasting needs. If you are interested in utilizing Questica for your non-profit, you can request a demo today.

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Non-Profit

About Questica

Questica’s non-profit budgeting solution – PowerPlan – integrates with leading non-profit financial and human resource systems. This ensures your organization can access all the information they need to develop, track, monitor and adjust their budgets, without the need of entering their data into time consuming spreadsheets. PowerPlan’s operating budget and capital modules also offer a multi-user system so department managers have the opportunity to view their data, such as salaries and benefits specific to their department, easily identify variances in their budget, create unlimited what-if scenarios and track workflow. In addition, Questica’s easy-to-use OpenBook transparency and data visualization software can be used to share your non-profit’s financial and non-financial information with its donors, board members, alumni, media and other stakeholders when and where you need to. To learn more about PowerPlan, Questica’s non-profit budgeting solution and how we can help your organization – watch a product video, read one of our case studies/whitepapers or request a demo, today!